How to Collapse the Distinction Between Art and Biology - Facts So Romantic

Language," the Beat writer William S. Burroughs supposedly once exclaimed, "is a virus from outer space." Burroughs was making a metaphorical extrapolation about the ways in which words, phrases, idioms, sentences, lines, and narratives can seemingly rewire our brains; how literature has the power to reprogram a mind just as a virus can alter the DNA of its host. Such a concept holds that more than just a simple means of expressing and communicating ideas, language is its own potent agent, a force that actually has the ability to shape the world, often in ways that we're unconscious of and with an almost autonomous sense of itself. As with something biological, language is capable of infecting, of propagating and spreading, of indelibly marking its host. In Burroughs' characteristically experimental 1962 novel The Ticket that Exploded, he writes that "Word is an organism… a parasitic organism that invades and damages."